CGS consulting services

As an individual, as CGS, or in association with other firms, Rod Chamberlain has carried out a number of assignments for corporate clients. They include:

CEO Mentoring

Mentoring the CEO and another Director of one of our largest, household name national charities

Mentoring the CEO and two other directors of a growing, highly respected regional charity

Mentoring the global head of their largest single business line for one of the Big Four accounting firms, as he planned for his forthcoming retirement from the firm

Mentoring the UK CEO of a Scandinavian-owned software business as the parent moved through different shareholders' hands

Mentoring the heir apparent to the CEO of a large company, converting him from a Court Jester to a genuine CEO

Observation and Assessment

Assessing the small core executive team of a private equity owned business start-up, growing rapidly through large-scale acquisitions

Assessing the 10 person Senior Management Team inherited by the incoming CEO of an AIM-listed technology business

Brief interventions with middle-ranking people in a professional firm lacking self-presentation, image and communications skills

Working with a global professional firm to observe, assess and feed back postgraduate trainees' interpersonal and behavioural patterns

Mediating a long-standing personal impasse between two valued executives in a male-female, boss-subordinate relationship, to get them reconciled and back to work in harmony

Role Play Training

Six months contract as part of a 12-person team training several hundred statutory regulators in behavioural and social skills for their meetings with regulated firms

Working with two of the world's leading consulting groups to provide client meeting and business development skills as part of their continuing training programmes

Addressing, as part of a regular seminar run by a former client's firm, groups of senior women executives embedding themselves at ExCo level and/or preparing for a plural career

HR Support

Confidential work with the HR Director of a high profile public body about to lose its core function, to plan the shape and implementation of the resulting, much smaller organisation

Putting together a two-day residential Retirement Planning Seminar for senior executives and their spouses, including financial advice as well as life planning

Training the relevant partners of a professional practice planning the first-ever cull of under-performing colleagues, 24 in all. Most had never had to give anyone notice before, and certainly not fellow-partners. The project included a workshop, written briefs, role-play training - and immediate reception of the dismissed people after each indivdual had received the news

Training to Interview, for partners in another professional firm - all extremely busy, all convinced of their skill and judgement as interviewers, and all horrified by the cost of their colleagues' poor hiring decisions! [In honesty we should admit that this programme was, perhaps not surprisingly, never delivered - HR could not get the buy-in from the partnership)

Board Mentoring and Governance

Quite separately from the career guidance services which are its name and mainstream, CGS is able to offer a range of Board level services. Rod Chamberlain and several of his associates have past and current active experience of Board work and advice to Board members.

In Rod's case, his Boardroom and Executive Committee experience dates back to 1981, comprising Boards or ExCos in:

Australia (joint venture start-up of a full-service bank)

England (private, public and charity sectors)

France (global trust fund)

Germany (Supervisory Board and Advisory Council of two banks)

Scotland (charity)

and working for organisations owned, in addition to the above, by entities in

Austria

Canada

Italy

Japan

Pakistan

Qatar

USA

He is fluent in German and French, with "a smattering" of other European languages.

He chairs, or has chaired, two corporate and one charity Audit Committees; the Trustees of a major regional charity in southern England; and the Christian Association of Business Executives, founder and parent of the Institute of Business Ethics.

This long, deep, cross-sectoral and cross-cultural service gives a wealth of experience to bring to bear on Board effectiveness and Boardroom behaviour, including "the language of influence and persuasion" as opposed to that of command and control; appropriate ways to handle the executive/non-executive face-off; the development of corporate strategy; human as opposed to purely system-based management of risk; and the accurate handling of people.